Attack on Planet X

Project Description

This will be a 2-D side scrolling adventure taking place in outer space. The enemies will consist of asteroids which will have no intelligence, lower level space ships which will have moderate intelligence, and higher level ships which will have the most intelligence. The game will be controlled using the keyboard and will be displayed in 320x200x256. This game will also have the ability to play 2 player cooperative over a network.

This is a preliminary copy of our background of the game.

Project Challenges

• Make a peer-to-peer cooperative network game with both ships fighting with the same goal.
• Use a 320x200 VGA Mode 13h Graphics at a color depth of 256 colors.
• Play background sounds and sound effects consistent with the action going on in the game.
• Create an Artifical Intelligence that is smart and just does not fly directly across the screen. We hope to have the Artificial Intelligence randomize the enemy's paths and which enemy appears based off of a timer.
• Integrate all of the above into a working program that shows no evidence of screen flicker and pauses in gameplay due to excess CPU operation.

The thing that sets this project aside from anything else ever done is in the Artifical Intelligence. The AI that will be designed for this project will be completely new and will generate random enemies with a random amount of intelligence themselves. This will be difficult to implement because it will need to be based off of the CPU's timer. The graphics will be drawn in a standard Windows Paint Program using a standard palette in the .BMP and .PCX file formats. The sounds used in this program will consist of background sounds (.XMI files) and sound effects (.WAV files). The networking function will be implemented using the NetBIOS protocol.

Project Breakdown

• Graphics Routines: John Brumbaugh
• Networking Routines & Program Flow & Menu Routines: Mark Andersen
• Sound Routines & Keyboard Control: Nathan Hamstra
• Artificial Intelligence: Matthew Curry

To view an in depth description of the functions that we will be using to implement this game, please click on the area in which you are intersted in above. If you want to look at some screenshots of the game, just look below.

These images are not the best quality because all of our players and enemies were created with a pixel size or 32x20 which cannot be displayed well on a web page, so we had to increase the size to make them visible. Another problem stems from the fact that we needed to convert them from BMP to JPEG which causes a slight color palette difference.